Hurdles are commonly used in track and field and other athletic events, as well as in physical fitness and athletic training/rehabilitation activities. A common hurdle takes the form of an upper horizontal crossbar having downwardly-extending struts at its ends, and having legs or bases mounted to the bottom of the struts so that the struts stand erect with the crossbar suspended above the ground. Users may then jump to try to clear the upper crossbar. A series of hurdles is often spaced along a raceway so that a user running along the raceway may attempt to clear the hurdles in the user's path while running.
However, such hurdles suffer from several disadvantages. Initially, while some hurdles are made to safely break away if their upper crossbars are struck by users when they attempt to clear the crossbars, those that do not have this break-away feature can cause injury. For example, hurdlers who catch or otherwise strike the crossbar may carry the hurdle along with them as they fall, and they may and land on top of the hurdle and experience enhanced injury.
Further, while hurdles are common pieces of exercise equipment, they are not used as often as they might otherwise be because they are generally bulky and difficult to transport and store. They occupy significant floor space in athletic storage facilities (and storage space in buses and athletic transport vehicles), and thus are generally disliked in comparison to more compact and transportable equipment. They are also time-consuming and inconvenient to set up and store; ordinarily, one who is setting up hurdles along a raceway can only carry one or two hurdles at a time owing to their bulk and weight. Because the hurdles are generally laid out over a substantial distance along the raceway, the installer faces the inconvenience of making multiple trips to obtain hurdles, walking them out to their set-up points and setting them up, and then walking back to the storage/distribution point to get more hurdles to be carried out to new set-up points. This can lead to long set-up times (and later break-down times) where many hurdles are used, which is a significant problem where the athletic field needs to be used for other purposes (e.g., where another sporting event is scheduled to occur after the hurdling event). There is a recognized need for means for rapid distribution and installation of hurdles; see, e.g., U.S. Pat. No. 4,221,395 to Carte.